We’re very excited to announce the launch of Civicist, a hub for news and analysis of the civic tech world. We will cover the growing ecosystem of people and projects using tech for civic purposes, building on the community-organizing and network-weaving we’ve done every June since 2004 during Personal Democracy Forum, and now year-round at Civic Hall. With this announcement, we’re also going to mothball techPresident, the group blog and news site that we started in 2007 to focus on how tech is changing politics. If you are a loyal techPresident reader, don’t worry—we are still going to keep an eye on that arena. But with Civicist (pronounced "Civik-ist"), we are going to focus especially on the ways people are using tech for social good.

May 7, 2015 is the date of the next British general election. On that day, everyone who cares to vote will go to their local polling station, pick up a small piece of paper, and mark on it, with a stubby pencil, their choice of candidate for Member of Parliament. The person with the most votes in each district wins. If one party wins a majority of the 650 Parliamentary seats, that party can form a government. If no party wins a majority, there will be a lot of dickering to form a coalition, as there was at the last election, in 2010, when the Liberal Democrats emerged as kingmaker and chose to ally with the Conservatives. By doing so, the LibDems offended so many of their own supporters that their number of Parliamentary seats is expected to drop precipitously this time round. According to a recent poll by the Guardian, the next government could well be a coalition of Labour and…the Scottish National Party. Read More

Wouldn't it be nice if there was only one day a year that people were wrong on the Internet? Unfortunately, that's simply not the case. And the problem doesn't stop with fake news. (Although that in itself is such a problem that The Washington Post puts out a fake news roundup every Friday.) There are more insidious problems in media: biased wording, overly general, overly simplistic or unsupported claims, and false assertions. These are just a few of the things that one can flag on the new social media platform, Fiskkit, which recently won the 2015 Launch Fest Social Impact Award. Read More

Earlier this week, The People's Lobby launched their first participatory democracy experiment in Provo, a city of just over 115,000 people in north-central Utah. Incorporating tools from both Loomio and NationBuilder, the process is meant to foster increased community participation in city government.

Edward Snowden and John Perry Barlow, "A Conversation Across Cyberspace" at PDF 2014.

Announcing the theme for this year's Personal Democracy Forum, our twelfth since 2004: "Imagine All The People: The Future of Civic Tech." We want to take you into a future where everyone is participating, a future that we build together using technology appropriately, powering solutions to shared civic problems. The future is what we make it; at this year's PDF we'll gather to hear from the people who are making civic tech that genuinely matters, and fighting to ensure that everyone gets to benefit. Register now to attend--this is the last week to save $100 on conference registration, our early bird rate has been extended through Sunday March 22nd.

Yesterday saw the public launch of Data Justice, a new organization dedicated to promoting economic justice in our data-driven society. Simultaneous with the announcement, the organization released its first report, “Taking on Big Data as an Economic Justice Issue,” written by Data Justice director Nathan Newman.

If last week's turnout at Civic Hall is any indication, a lot of people--technologists as well as organizers--are interested in figuring out how the 21st century economy can be built on more cooperative and less exploitative principles than the libertarian "gig economy" exemplified by companies like TaskRabbit and Uber. Folks came out for a panel discussion called "Think Outside the Boss: Cooperative Alternatives to the Sharing Economy," which was triggered by a thought-provoking essay by New School for Social Research scholar Trebor Scholz in Medium. Watch the video below the jump... Read More

At a Social Media Week event held at Civic Hall last month, Benjamin Yee, a former Democratic campaign fundraiser, asked a conference room full of people if they had ever donated money to a political campaign. Nearly everyone raised a hand. When asked if they felt it had ever made a difference: not a one. Even if someone does feel like they have been a part of something bigger—one of the many small donors who helped carry Barack Obama to victory, for example—that in no way means that the candidate you back knows why you contributed or what you hope they will do once in office. Money talks, but only if you have enough to get a phone call or an invite to a fundraising event. Everything else is just chatter.

In 2013, Humera Khan, Executive Director of D.C.-based think tank Muflehun, watched as a teenager was radicalised and recruited on Twitter. “Over the course of two years,” she recently recounted for Foreign Affairs, “that individual went from an activist championing minority rights to supporting Jabhat al Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria), and in a final shift of allegiance, to one of the the largest distributors of ISIS propaganda. He is now in Syria.” Despite reporting the case to the law enforcement agencies in the United States, Khan says her warnings fell on deaf ears. But in the wake of a sophisticated online media campaign that includes a number of gruesome videos of beheadings, governments are starting to take the use of social media by groups such as ISIS more seriously.

Today's press conference at the United Nations will not quell the controversy raised by a report from the New York Times that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account for government business at the State Department from 2009 to 2012. If you missed the political event of the day and want to watch or read it for yourself, unvarnished and unspun, on-demand video is available from C-SPAN and the Washington Post has published a full transcript.

“Once a symbol of democracy, the Greek Parliament in particular represents to the majority citizens a painful systemic failure,” wrote Antonis Schwarz and Panagiotis Vlachos shortly after they launched the political monitoring and accountability website Vouliwatch in March 2014. Read More

What’s a “holy shit visualization”? It’s a way of looking at data that makes turns a statistic you might have flipped past in a book or skimmed by on a web page into something that you can’t forget. It’s a visceral reminder of the power of images and the power of looking at dry numbers in human terms.

Trying to influence Congress is hard work. You have to know who cares about what issues so you approach the right people. It also helps to know who has the power to actually make waves so you don't waste your time with ineffective members. In January, two Harvard seniors launched an online platform called Quorum that does the bulk of that work automatically, using a number of public data sources.

In every country, fiscal policies are a mystery for the majority of citizens. This often generates the feeling that, somehow, the tax money is not well used by the public administration. BaniPierduti (Romanian for "lost money") is the name of a project that aims to increase awareness and understanding about local budgets. Read More

"Citizens could be assessing all kinds of civic opportunities." (yelp.com)

We have more opportunities to get involved in our communities, through a wider array of tools, processes, meetings, and apps than ever before. Some of these opportunities are interesting and beneficial, while others—especially the ones supported by governments in the name of public participation—can be frustrating and may even be harmful. So how should we judge? What kinds of public engagement are helpful?

A week ago, digital ethnologist Mark Pesce gave a talk here at Civic Hall on the topic of "Hypercivility." As you will see from watching the video, it's an extension of years of research and thinking he has done on the effects of hyperconnectivity on our world. Be forewarned, this is not an "easy" talk to watch or digest. While Pesce definitely has our social-media-powered "Age of Outrage" on his mind, he grounds his talk in a much more serious place: post-genocide Rwanda, which he recently visited. Read More

Nobody ever says “I want to live somewhere with lots of pollution, crime and a high unemployment rate.” That, at least, is the assumption behind Place I Live, a website that aggregates, parses and creates visualizations with open data so potential homebuyers and renters can better understand different neighborhoods. Place I Live relaunched on Open Data Day, February 21, with new data and improved functionality.

Code for America's fourth annual CodeAcross civic hacking event took place this past weekend, February 20 – 22, bringing together civically-minded technologists, designers, activists, organizers, and city government in roughly 60 communities around the world. The organizing theme for all events was “Principles for 21st Century Government,” although events varied in terms of duration and content. From Civic Hall in New York City to the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, to the University of Washington in Seattle, people gathered for data jams, hackathons, unconferences and collaboration.

Earlier this week a Little League baseball team was stripped of their championship title because of a whistleblower. That is what Chris Janes is: a concerned citizen who perceived an injustice and acted accordingly, trawling through public records until he had the evidence to take to the appropriate authorities. So why does his triumph make people feel so bad?

The City of Paris helps citizens assess the cost of their PB ideas (Source: City of Paris)

Last fall, Parisian voters decided how to spend 20 million euros of their city budget, the city's first participatory budgeting (PB) experience. This year there is more than triple that at stake, and the process of crafting proposals for funding has been opened to the general public. As host to Europe's largest PB experiment, Paris is leading by example. Read More

Transparency and open government advocates have been successful in convincing governments around the world to share some of their data with society at large. (And thanks to the Sunlight Foundation, we'll soon know which data they're not sharing, as well). But there is plenty of important civic information that isn't collected or maintained by governments. We need to supplement open government data with data from others to give nonprofits, governments, and researchers a more holistic understanding of reality.

"You are here to make decisions with others." That is the raison d'être of DemocracyOS: to help groups of people come to a decision in a democratic fashion. The team behind the software began working on the code in April 2012, and it has been available on Github for almost as long, but users had to be relatively savvy. The open-source platform they are currently developing, with support from Y Combinator, will allow anyone to launch a “democracy” in minutes, just as someone without any knowledge of code can launch a blog on Wordpress. That platform will launch in March.

Nothing brings people together on the social network Nextdoor like a lost dog. "If Tahoe Park had a crest, it would be a running chihuahua,” joked Isaac Gonzalez, a site moderator for Nextdoor Tahoe Park, a neighborhood in Sacramento, California. "What galvanizes a lot of people is lost pets, but mainly dogs. Every time a chihuahua gets loose, there’s going to be a message about it." To Gonzalez, Nextdoor both exemplifies and amplifies what it means to have an involved, hyperlocal community.

A whopping 23 guests spoke at a packed Civic Hall launch event last night, beginning with New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and closing with the CEO of Do Something, Nancy Lublin. Speakers included representatives from financial supporters Microsoft, Google and the Omidyar Network, as well as from Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo's administrations.

Picture “a screwdriver that could turn back the effects on climate change” or a “level for leveling social injustice.” Science fiction? No: the inspiration for an exhibit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The artists, all first-year MFA students in the Design for Social Innovation program, were asked to create tools to solve social problems.

This month Civic Hall, the new home for civic tech in New York City, opened its doors to beta members like Simone Rothman, the founder and CEO of FutureAir. Beta members are people working in the civic tech space who have been invited to try out Civic Hall for the month of January: to work in the space and see what it is like, and in turn provide feedback to the Civic Hall team. We caught up with Rothman to ask about her work and find out what she hopes to see and do here at Civic Hall. Read More

This month Civic Hall, the new home for civic tech in New York City, opened its doors to beta members like Jeanne Brooks, executive director of Hacks/Hackers. Beta members are people working in the civic tech space who have been invited to try out Civic Hall for the month of January: to work in the space and see what it is like, and in turn provide feedback to the Civic Hall team. We caught up with Brooks to ask about her work and find out what she hopes to see and do here at Civic Hall. Read More

Front Porch Forum creates online communities for real-life neighborhoods. We have an excerpt about FPF from Allison Fine's new book, Matterness, and an interview with the founder, Michael Wood-Lewis. Read More

This month Civic Hall, the new home for civic tech in New York City, opened its doors to beta members like Erin Vilardi, the founder of VoteRunLead. Beta members are people working in the civic tech space who have been invited to try out Civic Hall for the month of January: to work in the space and see what it is like, and in turn provide feedback to the Civic Hall team. We caught up with Vilardi to ask about her work and find out what she hopes to see and do here at Civic Hall. Read More

This month Civic Hall, the new home for civic tech in New York City, opened its doors to beta members like Tim Karr, of Free Press. Beta members are people working in the civic tech space who have been invited to try out Civic Hall for the month of January: to work in the space and see what it is like, and in turn provide feedback to the Civic Hall team. We caught up with Karr to ask him about his work and find out what he hopes to see and do here at Civic Hall. Read More

Believe it or not, it isn't too soon to start planning to attend Personal Democracy Forum 2015, taking place June 4-­5 at New York University's Skirball and Kimmel Halls. This is our twelfth annual conference and we've got a terrific group of speakers already confirmed--it's time to take advantage of our early-bird rates, and tickets are limited. Read More

NationBuilder officially launched in 2011, and, since then, it has grown from a start-up to a company that employs 70 people and from a beta platform to one used by over 1,000 organizations—from civic activists to gelato shops—to find new members, track their involvement, and then encourage them to meet in person. In 2014, NationBuilder’s customers used the platform to raise over $200 million and to recruit nearly 900,000 new volunteers.

The grand jury tasked with deciding whether to indict the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown heard 70 hours of testimony. The 60 witnesses and three medical examiners gave conflicting accounts about Brown’s last minutes. Ultimately, the grand jury opted not to indict. Their decision left many asking: What if there was a video? What if there was better oversight of police misconduct? Was Michael Brown a unique tragedy or part of a larger trend? The ACLU’s Mobile Justice App and Five-0 are technologies that will hopefully help answer these questions and protect communities from police misconduct.

Civic Hall, our new collaborative community center for civic tech innovators will be opening in “beta” mode in late January. If you want to get in on Civic Hall's ground floor--well, literally we're on the second floor--send in your application now. Read More

In 2007, WikiLeaks received and published documents revealing corruption and misconduct perpetuated by the former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi and his family. The case, which was then picked up by the Guardian, helped Julian Assange’s nascent whistleblowing platform gain crucial momentum]. Now, history is coming full circle asThe African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) has launched afriLeaks, a pan-African whistleblowing platform, by gathering together a dozen partner media companies. Read More

t’s no secret that governments and political actors now make use of social robots or bots—automated scripts that produce content and mimic real users. Faux social media accounts now spread pro-governmental messages, beef up web site follower numbers, and causeartificial trends. Bot-generated propaganda and misdirection has become a worldwide political strategy. In this guest post, Sam Woolley and Phil Howard suggest some ways to fight back. Read More

This past summer my colleague Jon Tippens and I forked Smart Chicago’s Expunge.io to create ExpungeMaryland.org. Since ExpungeMaryland’s launch in July, there has been interest in how we created the app. This post provides background to other jurisdictions looking to replicate the expungement app model. Read More

Joe Rospars recently wrote in Time about the perceived “creative crisis" in the Democratic Party, a debate about online fundraising, and the responsibility writers, digital directors, and even candidates have to the creative direction of a campaign. Joe's answer -- “Don’t be lame” -- is a great place to start. But it doesn’t answer the why: Unlike those TV ads, email is personal. Read More

The following is an edited transcript of an interview that Alex Howard conducted with James Windon, the president of civic engagement startup Brigade, last Wednesday November 19 at the Fusion RiseUp event in Washington, DC. That morning, Brigade had announced that it was partnering with a “carefully curated” set of organizations: Rainforest Action Network, Americans for Tax Reform, the Drug Policy Alliance, Represent.Us, Generation Opportunity, Forecast the Facts, FreedomWorks and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
With more than $9 million in venture funding from Napster co-founder Sean Parker, Brigade has been amassing a staff of more than 50 while remaining quiet about how it plans to launch and grow a new social network for civic engagement. In this interview, Windon explains why he thinks there’s still room for “yet another social network” and how Brigade will attract users: “one of the biggest reasons that people have stopped participating civically is because their civic lives have become decoupled from their social lives,” noting that the company will be primarily focused on people’s relationship to local issues and down-ballot representatives. He also addresses the inevitable questions about a for-profit business entering the civic space, saying,“our best bet at how we will monetize is through advertising.” Read More

Blasphemy cases in Pakistan are considered a norm these days. However, the latest incident of a mob beating to death a Christian couple is the most gruesome manifestation of this sensitive issue. The couple in Punjab was alleged to have desecrated a copy of the Qur’an. The mob attacked the couple, killed them, and later burnt their bodies in the brick kiln where they worked. The blasphemy law presents a frightening level of vigilante violence where prison and private guards, neighbors and colleagues turn into mobs killing those accused of blasphemy. Unfortunately, this mob behavior is being strengthened by the increasing adoption of technology in the country like mobile phones and the internet.

Liberian youths flash their mobile phones in support of UNICEF's U-Report (UNICEF Liberia)

The fight against Ebola in West Africa is far from over. TechPresident recently covered New York Tech Meetup’s Ebola Hackathon and wrote about what technology can and can’t do. But what emerged from these discussions is that technology needed to be more responsive -- designed after community input and not before. Here are a few systems that were built in just that manner. Read More

Jersey Shore Hurricane News has grown into a news outlet for much more than just severe weather updates (credit: Robert Siliato)

When Hurricane Irene barreled down on the East Coast in 2011, one news source had some irregular advice from one New Jerseyan to another: "Fill up some Ziploc bags with water NOW and freeze....keep them on hand for when we lose power and you need that ice to keep the beer cold." The tip was punctuated not with a period but with a smiley face, and it was first posted to Facebook, the home of a new citizen journalism outlet: Jersey Shore Hurricane News.

As the first edition of PDF Italia revolved around "the data society" we live in, there was probably no better person to start the conversation than mySociety's founder Tom Steinberg. Here's a writeup of his speech, ... Read More

Wednesday in London, as part of the annual Open Up? conference hosted by the Omidyar Network, I had the opportunity to interview Alan Rusbridger, the longtime editor of The Guardian newspaper, about the impact of Edward Snowden's revelations of massive government surveillance programs in the United States and United Kingdom. To my surprise, he was much more optimistic about the impact of the stories published in his paper and elsewhere, like the Washington Post and New York Times, than I expected. And he laid out an extraordinarily ambitious agenda of unfinished work that Snowden has prompted. Read More